Page 33 of Broken Empire
“You’re right. Sorry, I wasn’t thinking,” Leah said. She leaned forward and sighed, slowly rubbing her temples. “I just… I can’t believe it. How much shit is that poor girl going to go through?”
“Hopefully none, if we can find her in time,” I said. “So can you help me or not?”
“Yes. Of course.” She turned her attention back to her computer, hands hovering over the keyboard. “Sorry. This has really fucked me up. I don’t even know what to do now.”
“I’m guessing you’ve never come across any red rooms, then.”
“Nope. They’re an internet myth. Or so I thought.” She hesitated, then straightened her spine and threw her shoulders back. “I might have an idea.”
“Yeah?”
She typed a URL into the Tor address bar.Blackboard.onion.“This is a massive deep web forum,” she explained to me as she waited for the site to load. “People come on here and post all sorts of bullshit, but there’s a huge section that’s used for anyone who’s looking for stuff. Like, illegal stuff.”
“Sounds promising.”
“Yeah. There’s a couple of problems, though. Everyone talks in riddles and codes because there are always feds lurking in these forums. So no one is going to post something like, ‘hey guys, where can I hire an assassin online?’ or ‘hey, where can I find a real red room?’ because if they do, everyone will know it’s just a trap set by the feds to catch anyone who’s into that shit.”
“So you really have to know what you’re looking for, including any coded phrases they might use.”
“Yeah, exactly. Another problem is this.” Leah turned the laptop to face me. “Shitposters.”
“What does that mean?”
“People trolling. Posting stupid shit. Asking dumb questions just to waste everyone’s time. Ninety percent of this site is stuff like that, no matter what section you’re looking in. So we’ll have to sift through all of that and hope we find something that can point us in the right direction.”
“I should download that Tor thing on my phone, right?” I asked. “So I can help.”
“Yup. Two sets of eyes on two screens will halve our search time,” Leah said, snatching my phone from me. She played around with it for a few minutes before handing it back to me. “Here. You take the first hundred pages in this subforum. I’ll take the next hundred. We’re looking for anything that looks like it might be related to red rooms or the words ‘meat market’.”
We spent the next three hours on the Blackboard forum, combing through every single page.
The sheer density of anonymous comments and questions was mind-blowing. Every time I wondered if I was coming to the end of a particular thread, there would be one more rumor, one more depraved anecdote, one more trolling asshole, or one more link to click. It was like stumbling through a carnival funhouse filled with trapdoors, dead ends, and twisting tunnels that led into empty rooms.
I sat back and rubbed my eyes. “The trolling is unbelievable on this site. It never ends.”
“I know. It’s ridiculous,” Leah said, pursing her lips. Her forehead creased, and she squinted at her screen. “Hey, this could be something.”
She tilted the screen to show me a thread buried deep in the archives. It was titled:LF auth RR/BR
“I’m guessing this means ‘looking for authentic red rooms or black rooms,” Leah said, clicking into the thread. She peered at the screen and let out a groan. “Oh, for fuck’s sake. I should’ve known better.”
I looked over her shoulder to see an endless line of replies saying: ‘Your mom’s basement’.
“Jesus, there’s like forty pages of it,” I said, furrowing my brows. “How much fucking time do these trolls have?”
Leah rolled her eyes. “Too much.”
“What about that comment?” I said, pointing to one of the replies.
Leah looked blankly at the screen. “It says ‘your mom’s basement’ like the rest.”
“Yeah, but it’s hyperlinked. The rest aren’t.”
“Oh, shit. You’re right,” she said, eyes widening. “Someone might’ve hidden a real answer inside all this trolling. Let’s see.”
She clicked on the link from the troll comment. A white page showed up with a line of black text at the bottom—a web address. It was insanely long, but buried within the string of symbols and punctuation were two key words:meat market.
“Holy shit, this could be it.” Leah copied and pasted the URL into the Tor address bar.
